On the heels of the amusing spectacle of global warming marchers in Denver huddled against icy blasts of Spring snow, and New York Times readers losing their collective mind after new-to-the-Times columnist Brett Stephens raised delicate questions about how far the settled science actually reaches (“Burn the witch!” is how David Harsanyi sums up the mob of commenters) it is useful to take stock.

The chasm is growing wider between activists who demand urgent action to reduce carbon, and the general public who places predicted warming somewhere on a spectrum of other immediate challenges, from the economy to health care to mushrooming world tensions. The certitude and rigidity with which some activists and politicians demand Americans surrender their comforts and freedoms to sweeping “green” political demands is racing far ahead of what any reasonable body of science supports, and more to the point, is racing far ahead of the public’s willingness to comply or to elect politicians who will enact. It is driving the climatistas bonkers.

What explains this widening chasm? It might have to do with the Left’s poor 50 year record at predicting anything about the climate with anything resembling accuracy. New Ice Age! No, warming. The glaciers and poles and polar bears are about to disappear! Fires, and flooding, no bears!

Every measurable predicted catastrophe failed. The hard sell hasn’t worked. So the activists pound harder. More green bell! We need more green bell!. Eventually average citizens with real lives to live tune out the hyperventilation.

This clip from Good Morning America in 2008 is a classic of the genre. If you are reading this post, it must be from a survivalist bunker in the high ground somewhere well inland and away from combustible forests, while you’re rationing $12 milk and $10 gasoline. Enjoy.

If you were cool enough to get into Yale University, you could make bold social statements by going on a “symbolic” hunger strike where you don’t have to go hungry.

It’s like being a US Senator and you can filibuster just by announcing it. You don’t actually have to hold the mike for hours and hours. But, for a participation prize, you still get to hold up the business of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” in the upper chamber of the most powerful nation on earth.

How long was it settled science that fat and eggs and cholesterol are terrible for the cardiovascular system? So, eat lots of bread! And salt is bad, too.

The settled science was wrong and created an obese, diabetic generation. And this occurred in small, compact biological specimens–literally billions available–which could be easily observed over a span of decades. Observed and measured, not modeled and predicted.

Now, tell me how perfect the computer model projections are for something as infinitely more large and complex as earth, oceans, and atmosphere. Predictive models that have been wrong in every instance, but that demand that humanity, Americans in particular, give up the affordable energy that has lifted billions out of poverty and misery. Which, coincidentally, will funnel many billions, maybe trillions through manipulable, rent-seekable channels, enriching elites unimaginably.

The “science” is, shall we say, funded with a corrupt thumb on the scale, and eminently suspect.

The weekend is in the history books, but we’ll always have the memories. Like when the climate action marchers protesting the new administration and Americans’ stubborn refusal to carbon tax ourselves back to the stone age got hit by a Spring snowblast. Now, every adult with an IQ higher than his or her age knows that a weather event does not equal climate. But climatistas and some celebrities and politicians haven’t gotten the memo. They are so tediously predictable and wrong in jumping to blame every tornado, hurricane, forest fire, dry spell, hot spell, or flood on “climate change.” Life must have been a paradise before indoor heating and the internal combustion engine.

Warm earthers making their point.Photo credit: KUSA

So, when they take to the streets to protest how modern civilization is torching the planet, only to get a cold wet dumping two days before May, well, it’s hard not to have one’s heart warmed a little by the schnowdenfreude.

Coors Field the day warming passed the critical point.Photo: Colorado Rockies.

Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a lawless order declaring it is okay for cities to establish policies and welfare and law enforcement practices that ignore federal immigration law, but it is unconstitutional for the Trump administration to withhold federal dollars from the scofflaw cities. Well, the Supreme Court will see about that. In the meantime, the Left is having a hard time stifling its gloating over the string of federal judges who have been eager to play piñata with Trump’s immigration policies.

Senior Legal Editor for Slate Magazine Dahlia Lithwick gloated “Trump can’t win his battle with the judges.” My purpose here is not to track the legal arguments over defunding sanctuary cities or targeting immigration restrictions at certain nations. Rather, it’s to shine a light on the casino house rules the Left tries to enforce in the courts.

The gist of Lithwick’s argument is that Trump is a blunderbuss who huffs and puffs wordwinds, but judges are careful stewards of the law who apply the text and reach prescribed results. They bristle at the suggestion there is anything political about their swings and hits and batting average.

“Here is one thing I can say for certain about judges: In addition to having a generalized and free-floating anxiety about public attacks on their legitimacy and authority, they resent deeply any efforts to say that words—the sole implement of their craft—have no meaning or that those meanings are inchoate and shifting and may expand or contract with the president’s hastily tweeted words or fleeting feelings.”

Aside from Lithwick’s sleight of hand in switching the gusts out of Trump’s mouth or twitter account for the text of his executive orders (is she suggesting judges have to parse Trump’s public prose to review his written orders?) she also executes a startling somersault about the Left’s conception of the proper role of the judiciary. Since judicial construction or interpretive philosophy entered public consciousness during the Bork confirmations hearings, liberals have insisted strict construction, originalism, or other forms of adherence to dead text is a dead end for public justice. Fair rulings require a living Constitution, flexibility of statutes so judges can plumb behind the words to identity the intent of the legislature, and other tools that essentially liberate judges from following the law, and empower them to enhance the law.

Lithwick herself has been one of the bearers of these tidings. In a 2010 interview on NPR, she dismissed John Roberts’ metaphor that judges are umpires; they don’t call the plays or play the game, they call ball, strike, fair, foul, safe out.

“It made judges look like they were robots who really didn’t matter what their preexisting views were because all they do is, quote, ‘apply the facts to the law.’ But while it was clever, I think it’s really disserved the judiciary, because it makes it look as though judging is easy, and it’s just not.”

Well, it certainly takes verbal dexterity to perform the semantic gymnastics Lithwick favors over Neanderthal originalism. In a 2005 NPR interview, Lithwick discussed response she received when she invited readers to send her defenses of originalism or of a living constitution. She found the arguments of originalists quite angry and the submissions for a living Constitution brilliant and nuanced. Lithwick sums up that restraining judges to law with fixed meaning is It’s “very, very critically important, but I don’t think it gets you where you need to go in most of the hard, hard, close cases.”

So there we have it from Slate’s Senior Political Editor. Judges need a verbal free hand to reach just results—until they are accused of applying a political agenda to thwart a president. And then, don’t be silly. They are just doing their job and following the law.